Answered: Deploying to Devices

Hello Sencha Touch Gurus,

The company I work for is considering using Sencha Touch to build mobile apps for some of our current web application.

In order to deploy these apps built with ST to our customers, do we necessarily need to do so through the Apple marketplace? Considering this is essentially a web app, can we just host the files on our own servers, and customers download from there?

If you're just building an application with Sencha Touch, then you are correct: simply host the site on your servers and direct users to the application via their web browser of choice. Same as any other web app.

However, Sencha Touch (by itself) will not create a native application for iOS or Android devices. If you want that ability, you'll need to wrap your Sencha Touch code using a tool like Phone Gap or Nimblekit.

If you're just building an application with Sencha Touch, then you are correct: simply host the site on your servers and direct users to the application via their web browser of choice. Same as any other web app.

However, Sencha Touch (by itself) will not create a native application for iOS or Android devices. If you want that ability, you'll need to wrap your Sencha Touch code using a tool like Phone Gap or Nimblekit.

I'm also glad you mentioned PhoneGap as I am looking into using it with ST. Once I do build my app with PhoneGap, can I still host the app on my own servers, or do I need to load it into the App store at this point?

I've been doing some reading, and someone correct me if i'm wrong, but it looks like I can host my app if I don't need access to the native APIs. But if I build my app with Phonegap, Nimblekit, etc, I'll need to distribute via the marketplace.

I hope this is 100% accurate. Maybe someone with experience in this area can respond to confirm or correct.

I know that when I create my Sencha Touch projects, I use a Dynamic Web Project (in Eclipse) to host it on web servers, and when using PhoneGap, I had to create an Android Project (included in the Adroid SDK). So it was two separate projects for a while, now I gave up on using PhoneGap and just stuck to hosting the applications on the web.

What do you mean by native API access? Currently everything on the mobile app only is using the Sencha Touch API and Web Services to and from the Webserver. I handle some alerts depending on the responses I get from my Ajax requests but I'm not sure I understand your question.

Thanks for all the responses. After doing some research I was able to find the answer to my questions. Basically, i'll be needing something like Phonegap to package up my app the way I want to. looking forward to using Sencha Touch.